Reforming Prince Hal: The Sovereign Inheritor in "2 Henry IV"

Author(s): JONATHAN CREWE

Source: Renaissance Drama , 1990, New Series, Vol. 21, Disorder and the Drama (1990),
pp. 225-242
Published by: The University of Chicago Press for Northwestern University

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41917266

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 Reforming Prince Hal:
The Sovereign Inheritor in
2 Henry IV
JONATHAN CREWE

The editor "matter

editor of 2 Henry
of 2 Henry IV, callsof it,Hal'smayIV,now
redemption," callsorit,tainted
seem too stale may as now A. R. seem Humphreys, too stale the or tainted Arden
for further consideration.1 It has certainly been discussed at length,
and to go on talking about it now is to risk the charge of reviving
the ideological discourse of the centered, sovereign, masculine sub-
ject. Resisting this possibility is in fact one imperative of a developing
critique in Shakespeare studies, the stakes of which are declared to
be high.2 This risk aside, the notion of Hal's reform may still seem
question-begging. The most influential current arguments deny that
there is any substantive reform of Prince Hal's character. These are
the arguments, associated mainly with Stephen Greenblatt, which
insist on Hal's role-playing, and hence on the theatricality of his
madcap character and of the metamorphosis he effects in 1 Henry
IV. 3

Instead of confronting these arguments directly, I shall simply point

out that, for better or worse, their privileged text is /, not 2, Henry
IV.4 The definitiveness of this theatrical reading of Prince Hal, based
on I Henry IV, is implicitly challenged by 2 Henry IV, and then again
by Henry V. In each of these plays the matter of Prince Hal's reform

225

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 226 JONATHAN CREWE

is reinvestigated, while the reform itsel

in his own person or - interpretively -
the repetition of the reform-attempt be
ing. Its apparent compulsiveness (or sociopolitical compulsoriness)
implies that a good deal is invested in it, not just by Hal, but by those
in the plays who expect it of him - and then also by Shakespeare, by
subsequent interpreters, and perhaps by a political imperative of
"reform" that Shakespeare receives and transmits. At the same time,
the sheer fact of repetition makes it increasingly difficult to imagine
in what successful reform would consist.

In fact, 2 Henry IV confronts us with just those issues. As already

noted by the Arden editor, the play proceeds as if the reformation
effected (or enacted) by Prince Hal in 1 Henry IV had never happened.
In his own eyes, in his father's eyes, and evidently in the eyes of the
world, Prince Hal is still the unreformed scapegrace prince.6 This
seemingly burdened prince keeps anticipating - or is it desperately
resisting? - his own reform right up to the moment of his father's
death:

O, let me in my present wildness die,

And never live to show th' incredulous world

The noble change that I have purposed!

(4.5.152-54)

What is implied by such deferral, resistance or incapacity? What is

at stake in reform? What is to be understood by the noble change
Hal claims to purpose - and with which he is credited by his father
at the moment in which the crown changes hands?7
These questions will lead on to further questions if, as I believe, 2
Henry IV reveals a deepening Shakespearean preoccupation with
mechanisms of "legitimate" change and succession, not just in the
historical narrative of the Henry plays, but at every level including
that of his own textual composition.8 What I suggest, in effect, is
that the fluid, somewhat facile, theatrical and/or metamorphic dynam-
ics of reform invoked in 1 Henry IV, enabling Hal as "Renaissance
prince" to effect his own spectacular transformation at Shrewsbury,
come into question in 2 Henry IV. On one hand, mysterious resistances
to reform surface in the latter play, while on the other hand the ever-

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 Reforming Prince Hal 227

questionable attainment of reform is staged

more fundamentally than in 1 Henry IV the
imizing transformation: in what does it co
mieux, is it managed? While no simple cou
spectacular metamorphosis necessarily emerg
the question of change-as-reformation; in d
to discover new interpretive resources or at
to deal with the important as well as time-ho
reform.

To begin with a sidelong glance at some interpretive leads that I

shall not pursue, it could be argued that the inconclusive repetition
of Hal's reform in 2 Henry IV skeptically exposes the emptiness or
wwthinkability of the historical reform-scripts Shakespeare inherits,
or even of the Prince Hal character he inherits from earlier texts.

Enough Pyrrhonism is in the air Shakespeare breathes - and in th

Rumor prologue to 2 Henry IV- for this to be entirely possible.
Shakespeare's apparent derealization of reform in 2 Henry IV coul
also be an effect of its displacement. The failure of "reform" to
materialize where one is looking for it, for example in the life o
Prince Hal, does not mean that it simply fails to materialize. Indeed,
Greenblatt implies that a displacement of reform is effected in the
Henry plays. Prince Hal's onstage reform may be empty in the sense
of being merely played, yet "reforming" Prince Hal also becomes
the one who, occupying the inside/outside position of the master
anthropologist in relation to the realm, will learn all its language
before substantively re-forming it as Henry V.9 The reform, in other
words, will not be the interior one that Prince Hal undergoes as a
character, but the one he effectively imposes as a centralizing, homog-
enizing, and nationalizing ruler, appropriating and transmuting all the
wild, polyglot diversity of an unreformed Britain. Yet this critical
displacement of reform, which is also a strong, conservative recla-
mation of it, again relies primarily on I Henry IV, and confirms the
tendency in Shakespeare criticism to read 2 Henry IV as a straight-
forward narrative and logical extension (if not a diminished repetition)
of I Henry IV. The surprising annulment, however, of the previous
play's reform action in 2 Henry IV constitutes a virtual starting over.
Implicit in this curious new beginning is the suggestion that the
reform-mechanisms of 1 Henry IV, which Prince Hal has exploited

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 228 JONATHAN CREWE

with a certain opportunistic brillian

were so only in appearance. These se
of "reform" will include theatrical
certainly been adept, but also var
change or exchange troped in 1 H
lated by Hal. It is he, after all, who appropriates and reverses his
father's thesis that he is a misbegotten changeling while Hotspur is
the real princely son. It is he who thinks that characters can be
"reformed" by positional changes since they are not real in the first
place. It is he, finally, who thinks that the commodity-form of char-
acter enables one to be exchanged for another (Harry Percy for Harry
Monmouth), or enables a good composite character to be acquired
through the appropriation of others' desirable properties, including,
as Hotspur complains, their "stolen" youth. Yet if none of this has
really worked, we may have to conclude that reform doesn't mean
change or exchange, nor does it mean the staged appearance of
change. What then, to repeat the question, does or could it mean in
2 Henry IV ? How are we to construe it?
Let us briefly recall some of the data concerning the young Henry
V that Shakespeare incorporates and revises. Various chronicle
accounts of the young Henry V, including near-contemporary ones,
mention not just that the unconstrained prince was a reveller, but
that he gathered a formidable popular following which included gen-
try and commoners. Most Tudor accounts of Henry V, including those
in Elyot's Boke of the Gouernor (1531), Redmayne's Vita Henrici
Quinti (1540), Holinshed's Chronicles (1587), and Stow's Annales
(1592) mention Henry's having given the Chief Justice a box on the
ear, but also mention punishments that include the young Henry's
imprisonment and dismissal from the Privy Council (Humphreys
xxix-xlii). The assault on the Chief Justice was, in other words, taken
seriously as the political gesture of a popular usurper-manqué threat-
ening to repeat his father's history. In The Famous Victories the young
Henry behaves, as Humphreys puts it, like a hooligan, though this
so-called hooliganism can also be read as a legitimate popular politics
of festive (and theatrical) revolt. Recognizing here a difficulty of crit-
ical description, but perhaps also of dramatic characterization, we
might say that Shakespeare produces a disconcertingly censored and/
or agreeably refined version of the young Henry V of folklore, chron-

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 Reforming Prince Hal 229

icle, and The Famous Victories of Henry V

editor describes Hal's alleged madcap revelling in 1 Henry IV as
harmless, and as essentially nonexistent in 2 Henry IV (Humphreys
xli). This is a marked departure from the sources on Shakespeare's
part - or, to put it differently, it is a conspicuous rewriting of the
young Henry. Insofar as Shakespeare renders the wild prince sur-
prisingly tame or inactive - and apparently less political - he may
appear self-defeatingly to void the dramatic action of reform by
removing in advance any real need or occasion for it.
Despite this apparent voiding, a persistent "need" for reform as
well as an action supposedly effecting it continues to be inscribed in
2 Henry IV. As external or objective conditions giving rise to this
need vanish, however, the need itself may increasingly seem to belong
to an order of shared psychic compulsion rather than political or
moral obligation. Indeed, the tame, passive, and increasingly ironized
Prince Hal who finds himself subject to the widespread demand that
he reform begins to resemble his chronological near-twin in the Shake-
spearean canon, namely Prince Hamlet, an "inward" protagonist
oppressed and divided by a troublesome demand.
Such an interior shift, in which psychic (in)action is "substituted"
for physical and/or overtly political action, is by no means unusual
in Shakespeare. Yet it is not necessarily a shift from the political to
the psychological. Rather, it is a move in which, characteristically,
the psychic interior is politicized while the political exterior is cor-
respondingly psychologized - that is, subjected to psychic "laws."10
This crossing isn't one in which the differentiated and prima facie
opposed realms of the political and the psychological are simply
deconstructed, but rather one in which a certain reciprocal recon-
struction is effected between these orders without the difference
between them ever being effaced. A proposal simply to shift from
political to psychoanalytic reading of 2 Henry IV would accordingly
be misplaced; what is required, I believe, is a reading that takes
account of this putative crossover. Whether we want to speak in the
final analysis of a psychologized politics or a politicized psychology,
it is in such hybrid terms that the reform action of 2 Henry IV takes
on whatever degree of intelligibility can be claimed for it. That, at
least, is the proposition according to which I shall now proceed.11

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230 JONATHAN CREWE

* * *

Whatever initial effect of unintell

reform-action(s) of the Henry plays
of models and contexts, historical and otherwise, for Prince Hal's
reform. Well-recognized models, which are neither fully discrete nor
fully successive, include those of a New Testament theology of the
"new man," of medieval psychomachia, of disciplinary humanist ped-
agogy, and even of ego-psychology. Coercive vectors of reform include
those of Renaissance subject-formation, of censorship and "courtly"
refinement in the public theater, and - broadly speaking - of what
Norbert Elias has called the civilizing process.12 The dominant model
that has been applied to Hal's reform is also, however, one that renders
it less rather than more intelligible: this is the model of the prodigal
son.13 The prodigal-model is a tellingly failed one partly because it
is not a narrative of primogeniture - of the scapegrace eldest son who
is nevertheless to be the sovereign inheritor - but if anything a nar-
rative somewhat subversive of that rigorously "unjust" principle. It
is above all a model that acknowledges no parricidal impulse or
dynamic in the process of reform and hence of "legitimate" or
"authentic" succession. If anything, once again, that dynamic is fore-
stalled, or displaced into sibling rivalry and reconciliation, in the
prodigal son story. This refusal in any sense to license parricide is
the condition on which patriarchal law and order properly so called
can be maintained.

The action (or inaction) of reform in the Henry plays conspicuously

does take account of the parricidal moment in the process of sovereig
succession. So, implicitly, do the chronicles in presenting the young
Henry as a usurper-manqué who raises his hand against the paternal
lawgiver in the person of the Chief Justice. So does The Famous
Victories, in which Hal's impatience for his father's death is an explicit
motif, assimilated to his general wildness.14 This parricidal recogni-
tion is accompanied in 2 Henry IV by an increased emphasis, rising
to the pitch of apocalyptic hysteria in a late speech by Henry IV, on
Hal's "wildness" as covert murderous savagery rather than mere
youthful excess. In the eyes of Henry, the ailing, threatened father,
the son's wildness constitutes an unreformed interior that must always

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 Reforming Prince Hal 231

be socially dissimulated. Correspondingly

or even show of reform on the part of P
dissimulation, the hidden content of which
once he has succeeded to the throne. Thus Henry IV prophesies a
wild apocalypse brought on by the unreformed, and perhaps unre-
formable, prince:

Harry the fifth is crown'd! Up, vanity!

Down, royal state! All you sage counsellors, hence!
And to the English court assemble now
From every region, apes of idleness!
Now, neighbour confines, purge you of your scum!
Have you a ruffian that will swear, drink, dance,
Revel the night, rob, murder, and commit
The oldest sins the newest kind of ways?

. . . the fifth Harry from curb' d licence plucks

The muzzle of restraint, and the wild dog
Shall flesh his tooth of every innocent.

O, thou wilt be a wilderness again,

Peopled with wolves, thy old inhabitants!
(4.5.119-37)

Despite its prophetic hysteria, Henry's vision isn't wholly incon-

sistent with the expanded potentiality given in 2 Henry IV to resistant
wildness and the "need" to reform. Nor is it inconsistent with the
threatened tragic declension of wildness from relatively harmless mas-
quing and revelling in 1 Henry IV to savagery in 2 Henry IV. In other
words, it is not just the issue of parricidal succession, but of a cor-
responding predatory "wildness" resistant to any transformation - a
wildness anterior and interior to civility, to the process of lawful
inheritance, and to legitimized political rule - that 2 Henry IV appears
to take more seriously than does its predecessor. As this issue surfaces,
the historical contingencies of Bolingbroke's "parricidal" usurpation
and Hal's wildness may seem increasingly to belong to an order of
necessity - in which case Henry IV 's prophecy may also begin to
sound like hysterical denial.
Insofar as succession is conceived to be wild in 2 Henry IV, and
to be so of necessity, its dynamic may seem to originate or inhere
in the male character or specifically male agency ; not as a natural

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 232 JONATHAN CREWE

fact but as the consequence of what

politicized psychology or psychologi
sion. It is this agency that is "missin
reform that would, in effect, make Hal
Under the "post-theatrical" regime of
itor will be required to reform in or
also (contradictorily) be required not
Moreover, the paternal demand for r
forestall rather than facilitate succe
the sovereign inheritor. Under these
anticipation and deferral of reform
curious paralysis and avoidance of hi
Prince Hal and his father alone that the difficulties or even contra-

dictions of reform are precipitated out in the play. Falstaff is exultantly

unreformed and unreformable; he and his cronies, fond recallers of
their wild youth, help at least as much as do Prince Hal and his father
to unpack reform in the play.
At one level, the Falstaff-Shallow-Silence episodes function as a
wickedly satirical exposure of "original" male deficiency rather than
wild excess. There is no need to belabor the point that the wild youth
of Shallow and Silence is a nostalgically recalled condition, denied
by their contemporary, Falstaff. Their wild youth as unreformed stu-
dents belongs to a commonplace nostalgic script, beloved of the law-
abiding elderly. No need either to belabor the point that, insofar as
Falstaff has claims to be the real wild man of the play, he is a wild
old man. If anything, wildness is more plausibly the social condition
of the old man than the young one, and it is more plausibly a function
of social denial, marginalization, and conscious impotence than of
any supposedly untamed or untamable excess in the "true" male
character. In this satirically reductive setting, the name of Fall-staff
speaks him no less than do those of Shallow and Silence.
The genuinely funny satirical comedy, as distinct from festive hear-
tiness, of the Falstaff-Shallow-Silence episodes may thus seem to con-
test the "wild" male character and its ontological violence of agency
as well as the process of succession in which it is justifyingly sub-
sumed. Yet the zero-point of final reduction is one at which we never
quite arrive. Or, more accurately, the satirical vanishing-point of
"wild" maleness turns out to be indistinguishable from its mythic

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 Reforming Prince Hal 233

origin, glimpsed in and through Falstaff s all

Shallow:

I do remember him at Clement's Inn, like a man made after supper of a

cheese-paring. When a was naked, he was for all the world like a forked
radish, with a head fantastically carved upon it with a knife. A was so forlorn,
that his dimensions to any thick sight were invisible; a was the very genius
of famine, yet lecherous as a monkey, and the whores called him mandrake.
(3.2.302-09)

What this strange "recall" produces is a subhuman or inhuman gro-

tesque of indeterminable sex, or of no sex at all, like the bare, forked
animal Lear thinks he sees on the heath. (The apparition here is fully
in keeping with Elizabethan folklore regarding the mandrake root: it
can look male, female, or androgynous; human or non-human.)
Apparently open to any construction - or to no determinate one -
the root-like apparition of the young Shallow may all too literally
mock any aspiration to get to the root of the matter of reform in
terms of gendered character. What we find at the end of the line is
literally a root.
At the critical moment, however, the interposition of a "thick-
sighted" observer relativizes and equivocates any ontological deter-
mination. Furthermore, while the stark-naked Shallow is seen from
the start as a remainder - a cheese-paring - rather than a bodily total-
ity, and while he is always and already subsumed in an order of
figurative likeness - he is cheese-like, radish-like - this characteriza-
tion through deficiency is tantamount to masculine recharacterization
in terms of insatiable appetite rather than substance or "matter."
Appropriately, it is Falstaff who effects this particular recharacteri-
zation. He assimilates any male sexual deficiency to a psychic and
bodily economy of "prior" starvation, while, as characteristically, he
recalls Shallow in the guise of an edible vegetable - a garden radish -
and thus as an object as well as subject of insatiable appetite. It is
left to the whores to translate this garden radish (ironically?) into the
exotic and erotically mythologized mandrake root. Exotic sexual
desire is thus superinduced upon domestic appetite in a novel etiology
of the ontologically violent male character. It is evidently in terms
of this prior "deprivation" and consequent appetite that greedy Fal-
staff not only resists reform, but considers himself entitled (and

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 234 JONATHAN CREWE

driven) by "law of nature" (3.2.326) to

such dace as Shallow - or Prince Hal as in
it were to be suggested that Falstaff fail
ambitions because he is captive to a dysfunctional conception of
ontological necessity and empowerment, it should be recalled that
an intuition of the same drive may inform Henry IV's prophecy that
Hal's reign will be one of unbridled appetite: "fleshing the tooth on
every innocent."
The point to be made here is that the "need" to reform as well as
the sources of resistance to it remain curiously undetermined and
overdetermined in 2 Henry IV without ceasing to be invoked as
crucial to the play's action(s) and outcome(s). I have already suggested
that this situation gains a certain intelligibility if it is critically linked
to what I have called a psychologized politics or politicized psy-
chology of masculine sovereignty; this linking does not constitute an
explanation so much as an attempt to (re)situate the problem where
it belongs. At a minimum, the "return" of an ontological violence
seemingly displaced from 1 Henry IV is at issue in 2 Henry IV, as it
is in Julius Caesar and Hamlet. That this attempt to resituate isn't
wholly misplaced is suggested by the terms in which Hal's "reform"
and the royal succession are finally staged - or perhaps, faute de
mieux , stage-managed. This event transpires in the complicated bed-
room scene between Hal and his father.

Briefly to reprise, Prince Hal's reform in 1 Henry IV, climactically

staged on the battlefield of Shrewsbury, may seem, in the extended
perspective offered by 2 Henry IV, like a dress rehearsal. There, Prince
Hal stages his own spectacular apotheosis for such wondering "cho-
ral" onlookers as Vernon, but also kills his rival-twin Hotspur in an
act of virtual Brudermord, unbestraft in this case. (Falstaff finishes
off the job but also decodes it, as the saying goes, by wounding
Hotspur in the groin.) Hal then gives full credit for the deed to Falstaff
in a way that conveniently masks the doer from most of those onstage
if not from the audience. It is as if Henry IV sees through just this
dissimulation of savagery; his deathlike sleep in 2 Henry IV accord-
ingly seems like a device of entrapment designed to make Prince Hal
show his murderous hand - as Henry believes Hal has done when he
seizes the crown and tries it on.

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 Reforming Prince Hal 235

Furthermore, as Henry IV approaches his en

Prince Hal not just as the feral harbinger
wilderness (wild-boy as wolf-boy) but, in a
sovereign male appetite and desire, as the o
reborn: a savage "Amurath" rather than a gen
is not what Warwick understands to be hap
that the Shakespearean Prince Hal is studying
the language" [4.4.69] - to engross all langua
this dread.)15 As if confirming this anticipat
the play as well as Henry's life, Hal is sudden
in the guise of sibling-delegates including
Prince John; in Henry's view, however, he al
those sibling-agents along with everyone el
feared outcome is what Henry attempts to
imploring his son Clarence to become Prince
while sentimentally fabricating a more huma
"mixed") character for Prince Hal:

For he is gracious, if he be observ'd,

He hath a tear for pity, and a hand
Open as day for melting charity:
Yet notwithstanding, being incens'd, he's flin
As humorous as winter, and as sudden
As flaws congealed in the spring of day.
(4.4.30-35)

These scarcely tractable anxieties, which threaten to bedevil any

smooth or consensual transfer of power between a threatened father
and a supposedly unreformable son, are, however, mitigated by a
certain identification on Henry's part with Prince Hal: identification
in the sense both of sympathetic recognition and recognition of like-
ness. Indeed, Henry's dread is also the projection of an unsatisfied
appetite upon Prince Hal: specifically, an appetite for the power that
he has desired but conspicuously failed to concentrate in himself
during his troubled reign. The differences between himself and Prince
Hal on which he keeps harping are thus undercut, even in his own
mind, by the perception of likeness:

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 236 JONATHAN CREWE

Most subject is the fattest soil to wee

And he, the noble image of my youth
Is overspread with them.
(4.4.54-56)

This part of his conjoins with my dis

And helps to end me.
(4.5.63-64)

It is partly Henry's recognition of

settlement of the parricidal succession
Hal. It allows Henry to be reconciled t
and to displacement by one who can
as a rival. It allows Hal's reform to be effected in a mode of vertical
rather than horizontal exchange, Harry for Harry again. It allows
Henry's own putative hunger and wished-for engorgement to be
glimpsed, even as it does Hal's putatively corresponding insatiable
appetite:

How quickly nature falls into revolt

When gold becomes her object!

For this [fathers] have engrossed and pil' d up

The canker' d heaps of strange-achieved gold.
(4.5.65-71)

Finally, since the "wildness" to be reformed does not constitute a

category of absolute difference, or definitively characterize anyone
in particular, its putative form and location can be shifted around in
the process of settlement.
Briefly, what this situation allows is that wildness in its various
aspects as criminality, natural excess, inordinate appetite, and even
fulminating disease can consensuali y be transferred from the scape-
grace son to the father as original usurper, on one hand allowing it
to be buried with the corpse and on the other permitting the instantly
reformed son to become the legitimate heir. Hal can then ostenta-
tiously place himself under the paternal law, embodied in the Chief
Justice, and begin laying down the law himself. As soon as Henry
"confesses," the reforming and legitimating bargain is sealed:

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 Reforming Prince Hal 237

For all the soil of the achievement goes

With me into the earth. It seem'd in me
But as an honour snatch' d with boist'rous hand.
(4.5.189-91)

The sole acknowledgment of this parricidal "boisterousness" will not

only be in the past tense, but will occur in the moment in whi
the violent hand is being transferred for burial from son to father.
This relatively diplomatic transaction does, however, have a price.
It is paid by neither party to the transaction, and the payment exact
is such as to suggest that the dynamics of the play do indeed belon
to a psychologized politics or politicized psychology of specifica
masculine sovereignty. In the complicated transfer we witness, t
Oedipal scenario is conspicuously reconstructed as one of exclusively
male agency, empowerment and succession. It is Prince Hal as inher
itor who, in a state of sublime innocence or Machiavellian callousne
reads the Oedipal situation as one in which the woman is always and
already displaced by the crown as substitute-object, which is to say
as object substituted for her, but also as object constituted in h
likeness:

Why doth the crown lie there upon his pillow,

Being so troublesome a bedfellow?
O polish 'd perturbation! golden care!
(4.5.20-22)

Syntactically, as Hal presumably doesn't register, it remains undeter-

mined which bedfellow is troublesome to which, yet the woman has
been displaced by the crown as the pursued and piously denied object
of appetite, while the void figure of the feminine {res nulla ) has been
appropriated and transmuted into the substantial figure of masculine
sovereignty.16 If this displacement and transmutation of the woman
can't be effected without a remainder of "feminine" meretriciousness
or troublesomeness, that remainder can in turn be identified as the
cause of any violent disturbance, not just in men but between them.
Indeed, it enables the crown to be incriminated as the real parricidal
agent, threatening and coming between generations of men, but also,
once identified as the source of the trouble, facilitating their diplo-
matic reconciliation:

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 238 JONATHAN CREWE

Accusing it, I put it on my head,

To try with it, as with an enemy
That had before my face murder' d my
The quarrel of a true inheritor.
(4.5.165-68)

"The quarrel of a true inheritor'' - the

essary" parricidal one - is realigned
the inheritor with the intermediate pa
object can in turn be reclaimed as t
benign transaction between father and
settlement of parricidal succession is
appropriated for it is women's agenc
vengeance.17
This version of reform as parricidal t
which the parricide is also backdated to
II, is of course no more absolute or final than the theatrical meta-
morphosis enacted in 1 Henry IV. It is undone again in Henry V,
while the brutal exclusionary reduction of the woman is "liberalized"
inasmuch as Henry V's legitimation turns out to depend on the law-
fulness of female inclusion in the royal line. Henry V must also even-
tually confront a French Catherine as potentially troublesome and
usurping bedfellow, whose language he is far from having engrossed,
and in relation to whom his provincial tongue seems disabled. More-
over, in the process of translation during the courtship, language is
punningly "engrossed" again in the sense of being resexualized; this
dirty talk isn't Henry V's forté.18
Inconclusiveness notwithstanding, what I should like to suggest in
conclusion is that our critical tendency to elide or "forget" 2 Henry
IV in this tetralogy, at the same time critically and affectively priv-
ileging I Henry IV, is related to an apparent displacement of onto-
logical violence and corresponding, agreeable theatrical facilitation in
I Henry IV. This tendency to overlook 2 Henry IV is heightened by
a certain critical tradition in which its disillusioning traits, including
the waning, sickening, or fading in it of the bright stars of I Henry
IV, are emphasized, as is the devaluation of the royal currency. Yet
in addition to getting down to some Realpolitik glossed over in I
Henry IV, 2 Henry IV marks the "return" of an ontological violence

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 Reforming Prince Hal 239

neither fully locatable nor fully erasable in

speare's production. It is the critique of such
be regarded as fully performed even if it is de
and professional contexts, that recalling 2 He

Notes

1. By "matter" Humphreys means primarily the extensive chronicle materials on

which Shakespeare draws in the Henry plays (as in the traditional phrase "the matter
of Britain"), but the term resonates beyond that denotation (xix). His term "redemption"
appropriately invokes the religious and morality-drama context(s) of Hal's putative
betterment. My choice of the term "reform" emphasizes secular contexts, including
that of a disciplinary, character-forming humanism. Mention of Hal's "reformation"
will, however, recall the Protestant epoch in which the play was written. See also
Dickinson 33-46.
2. This critique is widely implied in radical new historicism and/or feminism, partly
in response to the reading of Prince Hal in Stephen Greenblatt's "Invisible Bullets:
Renaissance Authority and Its Subversion." Traditional readings subject to this critique
would include all ego-psychological ones as well as C. L. Barber's festive-political
reading, in which Prince Hal progressively manifests his "sovereign nature" (192-221).
3. "Invisible Bullets" is the locus classicus for this argument. It does envisage some
changes in Prince Hal in 2 Henry IV, but not of the positive kind associated with self-
improvement.
4. The theatrical reading depends partly on Hal's self-unmasking in the "I know
you all" soliloquy in 1 Henry IV (1.1.192-214). The revisions effected in 2 Henry IV
suggest that this speech embodies the young prince's fantasy of masterful knowledge
as theatrical knowledge, soon to be dispelled.
5. Interpretively by various interested characters in the Henry plays, including the
politic archbishop of Canterbury in Henry V, who finds that, at the moment of Henry
IV 's death, Hal's "wildness, mortified in him / Seem' d to die too . . . consideration like
an angel came / And whipp'd th' offending Adam out of him / Leaving his body as a
paradise" (1.1.27-31). Quite soon, however, the clerics get down to postlapsarian
business, which consists in making a preemptively large contribution to Henry's military
budget.
6. This peculiarity is extensively discussed by Humphreys, who properly relates it
to the problem of the relationship between 1 and 2 Henry IV. While questionably
accepting that "redemptions" do occur in both plays, he concludes that "naturalistically
speaking these twin-redemptions are an incoherence, [yet] dramatically and by folk-
tale or morality canons they are acceptable" (xxviii). Humphreys concludes, moreover,
that the two versions of Hal's "redemption" are radically incompatible: while the playful
version in 1 Henry IV comes from Daniel and The Famous Victories , the serious,
father 's-deathbed version comes from Holinshed.

7. "Noble change" is a peculiarly resonant phrase. While the change effected in 1

Henry IV hardly merits the description "noble," the phrase invokes such change in

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 240 JONATHAN CREWE

the field of the play's representation but also in co

upward mobility, of disciplinary humanism, of r
culture and theater, and even of self-sacrificial ass
It is understandable, then, that the process of noble
complex, compulsory, and subject to endless resis
largely in terms of the play's representation rathe
8. Jonathan Goldberg's Writing Matter enables
displacement of the reform-action. It could be said
level of Shakespeare's "reforming" authorship and
erations similar to those of Hal's reform may apply
regarding Shakespeare's authorial "character" and t
2 Henry IV take on paramount importance. The p
that Timothy Murray sees being pursued by Jonson
mutandis, pursued by Shakespeare.
9. The republication of Greenblatt's "Invisible B
tions: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaiss
purview of new categories of displacement, circu
10. The apparent phenomenon of the interior shift
toward psychological (psychoanalytic) reading of
overlooked is the simultaneous shift in the other
the represented political world seems increasingly
11. I take it that implicit recognition of psycho
psychology has been widespread during the past dec
Freudian (often feminist) criticism. This is the c
necessarily crystallizing into a fully coherent mod
that importantly embodies this recognition with re
Rose, "Sexuality in the Reading of Shakespeare: H
12. The pertinence of courtesy literature and con
upon. Part of Hal's "reforming" consists in his "
courtier and a gentleman. However, see Elias for th
of this process.
13. We have been taught to recognize the sophis
and economic transcription of the prodigal reform-
century by critics, notably including Helgerson
stands.

14. I don't assume that "wildness" is mere code for parricide in the play; rather,
parricide appears to inhere in a more diffuse wildness. It is around parricide, never-
theless, that diffuse wildness seems to become centripetally organized toward the end
of the reform-action in 2 Henry IV. Harold Jenkins notes that the young Henry V is
not just a historic figure but a folkloristic wild-boy, hence some of the "trickiness" of
his reform in the Henry plays (Humphreys xxvi-xxvii). A pervasively invoked "wild-
ness" in the Henry plays can sometimes be construed as that of the wild sign in an
otherwise stable signifying system, or of the wild card - the joker - in a pack otherwise
stably denominated. If Hal is the character most often associated with these forms of

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 Reforming Prince Hal 241

wildness, perhaps especially as the changeling- figure in 1 Hen

exclusively so. Part of the difficulty in staging any reform-ac
ary-crossing character of this "wildness"; however, the "so
depends on this mobility.
15. Here it is pertinent to recall that "engrossing" means w
century - Shakespeare's all-engrossing mastery of the langu
threatening figure for the paranoid or even just anxious inter
16. Some of my locutions here are indebted to Eve Kosof
Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. It wou
actions she identifies "between men" can occur vertically b
well as horizontally between sibling-like rivals. See also Ber
17. The atrocities ascribed to the Welshwomen at the beginni
mutilation of men's corpses on the battlefield. Sure enoug
will be appropriated and re-gendered by Falstaff-Hal in the
falling-silent and disappearance of women in the course of
English epic-manqué constructed by modern critics) is cons
18. Some of the oddity of Prince Hal's character comes from
idle Falstaffian talk of his sexual adventures notwithstandi
indeterminate sexuality, which will include at least a homosex
itably to be suspected. The word "wild" could be applied to
not exclusively to it as a sexual practice, in the sixteenth c

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